Godzilla

"Godzilla," that tail-swinging menace from the deep, is back, along with a pair of friends, in a movie that comes in two distinct waves. The first wave is all people; the second wave, longer, is all monsters - and also people looking up at monsters and running down the block screaming.

They're screaming in Japan, then in Honolulu and then in Las Vegas. And just as you're thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge, the monsters are tearing through San Francisco, too, swinging tails and crushing buildings. After all, why go to the beach to stomp around, when every metropolis has a downtown just waiting to get destroyed?

We'll leave it to the psychiatrists to figure out why our most popular entertainments in recent years depict the toppling and smashing of our landmarks. Is this a healthy outlet for fear or some mass neurosis that's so widespread; no one calls it what it is? In either case, what's particularly weird about "Godzilla" is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction. We get the obligatory context, followed by monster fights - just stuff getting smashed and knocked down.

Perhaps in five years, action movies will stop pretending and just dispense with context altogether. They'll simply fade in on a couple of monsters fighting and show them banging into things for two hours. When we get to that point, "Godzilla" will be hailed as a significant step in that direction.

Yet for the first 45 minutes, "Godzilla" promises to be something better than that. Bryan Cranston plays a scientist in Japan, working in a nuclear plant, and like all fun characters at the beginning of a monster movie, he notices something on his computer ... something very wrong. There's a pattern of some kind, and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to. All we need to see is Cranston, bugging out, growling and showing his lower teeth, and we know things are really, really bad.

In those first 45 minutes, "Godzilla" has everything a monster movie needs. There's the one man who knows the truth. There's a monster of legendary proportions. And there are painful and dramatic encounters between human beings. It's pretty clear that nobody broke the news to Cranston that "Godzilla" was slated to be a throwaway summer movie. He's red-faced, terrified, anguished, enraged - he plays every scene like it's the last season of "Breaking Bad."

But this is a summer movie, despite whatever the calendar might tell you, and so the focus must switch to younger characters. So we get Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Cranston's son, a lieutenant specializing in disarming bombs, and Elizabeth Olsen as his wife.

Unfortunately, nobody bothered to write either of them a personality, probably on the assumption that it doesn't take much charm to run full out while stealing the occasional backward glance. In fact, that's when individuality is needed most. It's too vague to ask an audience to care about the fate of humanity, but every "Godzilla" movie must have at least two people you absolutely, positively do not want to see get stepped on.

This has no one. Taylor-Johnson's idea of playing a military guy is to have a stone face, and all Olsen gets to do is fret. Perhaps director Gareth Edwards concentrated too much on the action to worry about the performances. In any case, for at least 75 minutes of the movie, there's not a single moment of human peril that's made vivid or consequential. It's all just spectacle, whether it's people or buildings getting destroyed.

For some, spectacle will be enough. The visuals are impressive - these days, they usually are. In addition to Godzilla, there are two flying monsters, a male and a female, who thrive on radiation and can't wait to mate. Las Vegas' faux Eiffel Tower is knocked over like it's a toy, and the Golden Gate Bridge is mauled. In one scene, we get a shot of Honolulu from what remains of a high-rise, and the devastation looks like Warsaw at the end of World War II.

The movie's big visual showpiece is a monster battle taking place in downtown San Francisco. It's just monsters breaking things in a powdery haze of pulverized plaster, and, to its credit, the scene really does look as if it's actually happening. Still, without any human participation of any importance, it's hard to get worked up about any of it - and that's even if you happen to be watching the movie in downtown San Francisco.